Shelley: The Pursuit (153 page)

… what I thought was an old root which grew

To strange distortion out of the hill side

Was indeed one of that deluded crew,

And that the grass which methought hung so wide

And white, was but his thin discoloured hair,

And that the holes it vainly sought to hide

Were or had been his eyes. — ‘If thou canst forbear

To join the dance, which I had well forborne,’

Said the grim Feature, of my thought aware,

‘I will now tell that which to this deep scorn

Led me & my companions, and relate

The progress of the Pageant since the morn . . . .’
²³

Yet for all these literary presences and shadows, the poem transcends Shelley’s previous work, moving above it in that climbing spiral which first became obvious in the Pisa poems, so that the same material is now rediscovered and re-created from an entirely new and matured position. And everywhere it is filled with the atmosphere of Lerici, the heat, the dust, the broad sea, the foaming wake streaming away from the boat, the cold moonlight glittering on the water.

Shelley first wrote a thirty-line introductory passage which has something of the quality of one of his trial prose prefaces, which tells the reader little except that Shelley had stayed awake all night, ‘wakeful as the stars that gem The cone of night’, and had now lain down in the morning sun with his back against a chestnut tree — presumably the ship’s mast. The poem then begins abruptly, with much of the rapid cadence and speaking immediacy with which
The Mask of Anarchy
opens. The difference is that the line length is extended into the cool, measured modulations of the terza rima; for it is a much older poet who speaks:

As in that trance of wonderous thought I lay

This was the tenour of my waking dream.

Methought I sate beside a public way

Thick strewn with summer dust, & a great stream

Of people there was hurrying to & fro

Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,

All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know

Whither he went, or whence he came, or why

He made one of the multitude, yet so

Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky

One of the million leaves of summer’s bier. —

Old age & youth, manhood & infancy,

Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,

Some flying from the thing they feared & some

Seeking the object of another’s fear. . . .
²⁴

Shelley (the poet is now his own narrator and observer, as Dante casts his own persona in the
Inferno
) sits under his tree and gazes upon this stream of humanity, seeing everything in ‘a cold glare, intenser than the noon, But icy cold’, which obscures ‘with (blinding) light The Sun, as he the stars’. Gradually the scurrying, flitting activity begins to concentrate into a massive crowd, and from this, driven by a huge hooded figure, bursts forth the Chariot.

This is the central image, and the key passage of the poem. Throughout the description, Shelley is constantly reshaping the exact picture of the Chariot itself, so that it takes on a protean, hallucinatory quality, its outlines always altering and shifting as if seen through distortions of light or water. It begins clearly as one of the chariots of the Roman Forum, but gradually it turns into a kind of vast, trundling, crushing Moloch, and from that diffuses further into something simply like a great storm wave thundering through disturbed sea, and leaving behind it a creaming wake. The effect is brutal and terrifying. The Chariot is the chariot of Life, and those who dance around it are those whom Life will unhesitatingly crush, their intellectual joy and sexual energy fruitlessly sacrificed and destroyed. It is one of the great images in English poetry.

The crowd gave way, & I arose aghast,

Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,

And saw like clouds upon the thunder blast

The million with fierce song and maniac dance

Raging around; such seemed the jubilee

As when to greet some conqueror’s advance

Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea

From senate house & forum & theatre. . . .

… Now swift, fierce & obscene

The wild dance maddens in the van, & those

Who lead it, fleet as shadows on the green,

Outspeed the chariot & without repose

Mix with each other in tempestuous measure

To savage music… Wilder as it grows,

They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure,

Convulsed & on the rapid whirlwinds spun

Of that fierce Spirit, whose unholy leisure

Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,

Throw back their heads & loose their streaming hair,

And in their dance round her who dims the Sun

Maidens & youths fling their wild arms in air

As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now

Bending within each other’s atmosphere

Kindle invisibly; and as they glow

Like moths by light attracted & repelled,

Oft to their bright destruction come & go.

Till like two clouds into one vale impelled

That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle

And die in rain, — the fiery band which held

Their natures, snaps — ere the shock cease to tingle

One falls and then another in the path

Senseless, nor is the desolation single,

Yet ere I can say
where
— the Chariot hath

Past over them; nor other trace I find

But as of foam after the Ocean’s wrath

Is spent upon the desert shore. — Behind,

Old men and women foully disarrayed

Shake their grey hairs in the insulting wind,

Limp in the dance & strain with limbs decayed

To reach the car of light which leaves them still

Farther behind & deeper in the shade.
²⁵

It is at the moment of facing this appalling image of despair that Shelley discovers Rousseau, like the old root, resting at his side. Rousseau now offers to act as Shelley’s commentator and guide, and he explains the nature of the Triumph and points out many great public figures in it, including Napoleon, Catherine
the Great, the Roman Emperors, the Popes, Kant, Voltaire, Bacon, even Plato. All of them, Rousseau explains, had one underlying failure: their philosophy

Taught them not this — to know themselves; their might

Could not repress the mutiny within,

And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night

Caught them ere evening.
²⁶

This section of the poem is in many places only roughly blocked in; there are many gaps and inconsistencies in the stanzas, and in the margins of his manuscript Shelley left names and portraits whom he had not yet fitted in.

The second section of the poem is now developed. Rousseau begins to tell Shelley his own experiences of life, and especially of love, his own
Epipsychidion.
For him, the ideal woman brought disastrous knowledge of reality. Moving ‘between desire & shame’, Rousseau had questioned her about the true nature of human relations. In reply she gave him a cup to drink, a cup of experience. The ‘multiple image’ with which Shelley presents this flash of horrific discovery is unsurpassed anywhere else in his writing:

I rose; and, bending at her sweet command,

Touched with faint lips the cup she raised,

And suddenly my brain became as sand

Where the first wave had more than half erased

The track of deer on desert Labrador,

Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed

Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore

Until the second bursts — so on my sight

Burst a new Vision never seen before. . . .
²⁷

The new vision is Rousseau’s own first sight of the Chariot of Life in triumph. He describes more carefully the appearance of the young people who dance around it, and especially how the air all about them is full of shadows, and spirits, dark flitting shapes, like ‘a flock of vampire-bats before the glare Of the tropic sun’. Some of these shapes and phantoms come from the
faces
of the young people. It is as if layers of their youth were continually peeling away from their flesh and taking on their own grotesque forms of life, like hideous animated masks. The visage beneath gradually shrinks and twists as these masks or ‘idols’ fly off jibbering into the shadows.

… I became aware

Of whence those forms proceeded which thus stained

The track in which we moved; after brief space

From every form the beauty slowly waned,

From every firmest limb & fairest face

The strength & freshness fell like dust, & left

The action & the shape without the grace

Of life; the marble brow of youth was cleft

With care, and in the eyes where once hope shone

Desire like a lioness bereft

Of its last cub, glared ere it died; each one

Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly

These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown

In Autumn evening from a poplar tree.

Each like himself & like each other were

At first, but soon distorted seemed to be

Obscure clouds moulded by the casual air;

And of this stuff the car’s creative ray

Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there

As the sun shapes the clouds; thus on the way

Mask after mask fell from the countenance

And form of all; and long before the day

Was old, the joy which waked like Heaven’s glance

The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died;

And some grew weary of the ghastly dance

And fell, as I have fallen, by the way side. . . .
²⁸

This is Shelley’s final explanation of his own world of ghosts and spirits: ‘projections’ of his own personality, parts of himself left behind, or in the name of his old sceptical master Lucretius, ‘idols’, self-created delusions, and none the less real for that. The poem was now over five hundred lines long. Where
Rousseau began to talk of those who ‘Fell, as I have fallen by the wayside’, here, on his manuscript sheet, Shelley stopped, and wrote in tiny neat lettering: ‘Alas I kiss you Jane.’
²⁹
His train of thought was broken, and writing and scratching out half a dozen more lines, he put the manuscript away in his pocket. He did not write any more of it; in the end there was no time.
^*

Claire had arrived back at the Casa Magni on 7 June. She was now in good spirits, talkative and teasing as in the old days: Shelley called her ‘la fille aux mille projets’.
³⁰
Two days later, Mary was very ill in the excessive, sweltering heat and almost had a miscarriage, but she recovered. She began to hate the house.
³¹
Then on the 13th, looking like a pirate frigate, the
Bolivar
sailed into the bay of Lerici and fired a six-gun salute to the
Don Juan.
Captain Roberts and Trelawny were aboard, taking the ship from Genoa to Lord Byron at Livorno. Mary was glad of their company and they dined and stayed on at the Casa Magni for five days, making an excuse of the heavy swell and changes in the rigging.

The sea had got up so much on the 15th that the
Bolivar
was taken into Lerici harbour, and the
Don Juan
was moored up alongside her. Shelley and Williams looked enviously at the massive American rigging of their sister ship, with its three masts and cluster of topsails. In conversation with Captain Roberts, a scheme was conceived to re-rig the
Don Juan
, and build a false stern and prow section to increase the narrow, streamlined elegance of her profile. Roberts agreed to stay behind at Lerici when the
Bolivar
sailed.